Language is one of the most defining traits of humanity. Along with technology, it is one of the main and primal tools that enable humans’ interaction with their environment, and more than technology, it does the same in the interaction between people. While language surely describes reality, creating categories for items and events, assigning names and functions, establishing a collective orientation in a world of otherwise unrelated and alien phenomena, it also does much more than that, and its inherent and symbolical power determines reality as it is collectively perceived. When a reasonably large community shares a language and applies it to the place they inhabit, to the relations between its members, to physical objects as well as to feelings and thoughts, it creates a shared reality that assumes a precise meaning for the community itself, to the point that a single phenomenon, described by said shared language, will come to be itself and, at the same time, to symbolize something else. Whether language influences “common sense” or the other way round is quite a complex matter, and still debated: according to some (Livi, 1990; 1992) the common sense, intended as humanity’s intellectual perception of reality, is rooted in a transcendental dimension accessible to every human being as such, that grants the existence of a number of moral elements, values included, and of the language expressing them, so that abstract concepts like “truth”, “good” or “fair” are immediately comprehensible to anyone independently from geographical, historical or cultural background. A different approach regarding ethics has been attempted by Habermas (1981) and Apel (1967), who stated that the first effect of language in an ethical discourse is that of building the community in the first place. By defining through dialogue right and wrong, ethical and unethical, allowed and forbidden, a group of people creates itself by creating the (moral) world they move within, enriching mere events with the additional value of significance, of meaning. What is morally neutral in the natural world becomes meaningful for the good or the bad, and the shared values emerging from such judgements modify, transform and shape the world with the same efficacy, if not with a greater one, than technological tools designed properly for the task. Even more, Habermas’ (1973) dialogical ethics sees in dialogue itself a common will shaped through discourse, and delegates to it its own legitimation in terms of consensus and representativeness, since, allegedly, all interests, all views, all needs meet as peers within the discourse. A merely “communicational” ethics like this one, however, finds its limits in the verification of the basic conditions for its own realization: it ignores the power relationships that can – and do – emerge even within a dialogue, it doesn’t assure that all the participants to the discourse are competent, that everything is said is relevant or valid, that an impartial objectivity drives the examination of all the positions and proposals, that there are no influencing factors moving the dialogue from the outside and that the “logic of the action” is indeed the only objective pursued, that all the stakeholders have a chance to speak and express their view, that no part in the dialogue arbitrarily interrupts the discourse. Such a frail and most of the times inapplicable “universal” discourse, has indeed little claims to a true universality. One more convincing way to look at language in ethics is that of a Lacanian barrage: the introduction of the symbol opens new possibilities to the shared content of language itself, and the very fact that a group of people is speaking the same language, implies that they are inhabiting also a symbolical world in which the Self lives in the symbolical Other, and the “here” and “now” opens to the “not-here” and “not-now”. In the psychic operator Lacan (1966) calls Name-of-the-Father, the word is not an image, but rather a symbol, as it takes the place of what is missing, not only representing it but actualizing it under a different form. In this sense, the word is strictly connected to the desire, as desire is born from the lack of something: if both word and desire originate from lack, grammar and syntax, the “law of the word”, are the first, universal forms of legislation, establishing also a form of ethical law as they regulate desire in its symbolical manifestation. Law and desire are intertwined, both on the physical and on the symbolical plane, all thanks to the performative value of the word, the Hebrew Dabar, that holds in itself the very essence of the thing it is naming and thus taking the place of. Being the faculty of speaking so universal to humanity as such, independently on the single languages spoken, and that all languages have rules and vocabulary (law), we can speak of a shared, universal Transcendental all languages refer to, the same one that pairs desire and law. It is only natural, then, after connecting ethics and language, to introduce a transcendence that could be the foundation of both.